Thursday, June 30, 2016

Staunton, June 30 – The draft
Doctrine on Information Security posted this week on the website of the Russian
Security Council (scrf.gov.ru/news/1098.html) contains
provisions which threaten not only the citizens of the Russian Federation but also
Russia’s neighbors and Western countries, according to Vadim Shtepa.

The draftis filled with
contradictions because it contains language talking about the defense of the
constitutional rights of Russians and language that suggests some Russians are
a threat to the state just as much as outside powers and that the state must
defend itself against both.“It is
significant,” Shtepa continues, that it lists “certain ‘internal threats’ in
first place.”

The draft’s formulation of this task
is especially disturbing. The document says that the state must ensure “the
stable functioning of the information infrastructure of the Russian Federation …
in peace time, in a period of immediate threat of aggression, and in wartime as
well.”

It doesn’t specify who the enemies
are but does say that “certain ‘leading foreign countries’” are among them
because using information technologies they are having “’a negative influence’”
on Russia and other countries. Indeed, the draft says that they are “undermining
the sovereignty and violating the territorial integrity of other states.’”

One might think that they were
talking in the first instance about Russia’s own actions in Ukraine, “but no,
for [the authors of this doctrine], Russia is only a victim.” And it is “indicative,”
Shtepa says, that this doctrine was published at the same time that the Duma
was passing the punitive Yarovaya package of legislation.

But there are even more fundamental
problems with Russia’s draft information security doctrine, he continues.The draft specifies that Russia remains
overly dependent on Western information technology and that to ensure its
security it must overcome that by whatever means are possible.

But the means it identifies won’t
help it to do that. Instead, the doctrine specifies that “the development and
perfection of the system of the information security of the Russian Federation
will be achieved by the path of strengthening the vertical and the
centralization of administration of the forces of information security.”

Such a formulation shows, Shtepa
argues, that the authors of Russia’s new doctrine do not understand what they
are talking about. As various Western authors have made clear, “an information
society thinks in network categories which are distinguished in principle from
the former centralized ‘verticals.’”

The principles of an information
society were laid out 20 years ago in the Declaration about the Independence of
Cyberspace” drawn up by John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately, Shtepa says, in
Russia today, “this text certainly would be called ‘extremist’” because of its
call for freedom on the net.

To make his points, Shtepa cites the
recent remark of Umberto Eco who said that he had looked through some neo-Nazi
sites and sites opposing them and found that if one used only the algorithm of
counting references to Nazis, the one and the other would both be identified as
ideological threats.

“But Russian ‘warriors against
extremism’ operate precisely on such primitive logic and launch court cases for
‘the propaganda of fascism’ against those who publish anti-fascist caricatures.”
That reflects their preference for television with its “one-way” delivery of
information.

“The Internet, on the other hand,”
Shtepa points out, “with its interactive network connections and multiple
identities looks ‘extremist’ to them not out of any opposition ideas it may
contain but by its very structure.”That
makes Moscow’s pursuit of its idea of information security a danger for everyone
who relies on that medium and that message.

Staunton, June 30 – Most great
powers celebrate their status by pointing to their own achievements; Russia in
contrast seeks to boost itself not by doing that – there are too few to mention
– but by denigrating other countries, an approach Vladislav Inozemtsev suggests
is summed up in the phrase that however bad things are in Russia, they’re “better
than in Ukraine.”

Russian officials “and above all”
Vladimir Putin increasingly like to talk about Russia being a great power, the
Moscow commentator says; but they do so in a way that raises doubts that “Russian
politicians “really believe in the myths they have created” in that regard (gazeta.ru/column/vladislav_inozemcev/8334143.shtml).

If Russia’s powers that be really “consider
their country to be strong, it would be logical for them to suggest that it
occupies leading positions in the world on many if not the majority of
measures,” as the leaders of other major powers like those of the United
States, Germany and China do, Inozemtsev says.

But “in Russia for a long time
already has been put in place a different kind of discourse, based not so much
on the analysis of one’s own achievements as on a comparison of them with what
others have been able to achieve.” Such an approach, he says, began in the
1930s and reached its apogee with Khrushchev’s “catch up and surpass America”
slogan.

Unfortunately, subsequent events “showed
the illusory quality of hopes for the realization of this beautiful slogan in
practice.” The Soviet Union was simply too far “behind” and was falling ever
further “behind” as well.After 1991,
Russians had to face up to that lag, even though it made many of them
uncomfortable.

But in 2000, with the rise of
Vladimir Putin, there was a return to the pattern of boosting oneself by
denigrating others. A day before entering the Kremlin, the new leader talked about
how Russia could catch up with Portugal, even though at that point it was far
behind that European country in terms of per capita GDP.

Russia came close to doing so in
2013, Inozemtsev says, but then “the rhetoric [offered by the Kremlin] changed
again and this time much more radically.” Already with the onset of the
economic crisis, it became “fashionable” to talk about the fact that life in
Russia “all the same was not as bad as in neighboring countries.”

But Moscow made comparisons with
them because it had fallen even further behind from the major powers of the
world in terms of these economic measures. And with the crisis in Ukraine, the
Kremlin focused on that country above all, suggesting that the measure of
Russia’s greatness was the weakness of Ukraine.

Such an ideological trope,
Inozemtsev continues, raises questions about just how confident Russia’s rulers
are about what they are saying and inevitably focuses attention on how
unrealistic and unrealizable its “great power” aspirations really are, given
the way in which this highlights Russia’s weaknesses rather than any strengths.

“Can one imagine that the leader of a country
who was really confident in himself and in it would use such a line of
argument? That Obama in a message to Congress would tell Americans that they
should be glad because already now they live much better than their neighbors,
the Mexicans?”

Or that Germany’s Angela Merkelwould tell her countrymen that they should be
pleased because Germans live better than Czechs or Hungarians?Inozemtsev says he has “never heard anything
like that and thinks that he will not in the future.” But such efforts to hide
one’s own shortcomings by pointing to others indicates that those who make them
don’t see their country as they encourage others to see it.

“Of course,” he concludes, “one can
continue to talk about Russia ‘rising from its knees,’ about Russian society
being informed by ‘traditional moral values,’ and about [its] ‘weight’ in world
politics constantly growing.” But suggesting that Russia is already a world
power because on some measures Ukraine is doing worse than it is undercuts all
such claims.

Staunton, June 30 – A new poll
conducted by the Levada Center finds that Russians are more angry about what
they see as growing differences between the rich and everyone else in their
country than they are about ethnic or religious differences and tensions among
the population (levada.ru/2016/06/27/tochki-raznoglasij-v-obshhestve/).

That is not to say that Russians do
not see ethnic or religious differences as a problem but rather at a time of
economic crisis, they are more focused on economic issues and the differences
between the behavior of the very wealthy and the rest of the population are
more immediately obvious, experts say (rufabula.com/news/2016/06/29/social-problems).

Three out of four Russians (76
percent) now say that they sense strong tensions between rich and poor, and
four out of five (82 percent) indicate that these tensions could spark
conflicts. At the same time, however, only half of those (41 percent) said they
felt that such tension was currently “’very strong.’”

More importantly, the share of
Russians saying that such tensions are “’very strong’” has risen from 36
percent in 2009 near the start of the current economic crisis to the current
level. And Russians remain agitated by ethnic and religious differences: 52
percent say that they feel tensions between people of different nationalities
and believe they could spark conflicts. Forty-eight percent say the same about
religious differences.

Anastasiya Bashkatova, the deputy
economics editor of “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” unpacks these new data and concludes
that rising concerns about social class tension reflect the relative decline in
the incomes of Russia’s middle class rather than changes in the relationship
between the very rich and the very poor (ng.ru/economics/2016-06-29/1_poverty.html).

According to experts with whom she
talked, the Gini coefficient in Russia, which measures the incomes of the top
ten percent of the population as compared to the bottom ten percent, has
actually declined since the start of the crisis. Other comparisons of this type
confirm the same pattern, Bashkatova says.

But she notes something very
important: Those patterns are true only if one compares the situation now with
that of ten years ago or more. If one considers a shorter time period, “the
picture is different,” with the Gini coefficient rising since the start of this
year and income differentiation increasing. That is what this poll is capturing.

She cites the conclusions of
Lyudmila Presnyakova of the Public Opinion Foundation, who says that those who
have suffered least from the crisis are those at the very bottom of the class
structure, those who “don’t have enough money even for clothes.”And that means, she continues, “the
relationship between the richest and poorest hasn’t changed, but the middle is
becoming poorer, although it is not yet in the situation of the poorest.”

Nina Kozlova of the FinEkspertiza
company offers an additional perspective. She notes that in some sectors income
inequality has increased such as in the fishing industry while in others like
social services it has remained the same or even decreased relative to where it
was before the crisis.

But Andrey Lyushin of Loko Bank probably
provides the best explanation for the new numbers. He says that anyone can see
differences of wealth if he or she simply takes a walk because now some people are
driving luxury cars than are “100 times” the price of the kind of automobiles
others have.

When times are tough or when the
government cuts back on subsidies or increases the cost of services, that
matters more to people, and, he suggests, they feel such income differentiation
more strongly.